Growth is something that does have its own challenges and for an ecommerce industry, and there is no exception. But worldwide competition, the advertising costs, low margins, shipping. But one of the major challenges that confront the ecommerce industry is to make sense of the data as it enables them to understand the customers better and provide quality service. It has to be stated that functional data pipelines can lead to an improvement in sales along with marketing in ecommerce.
How the role of data in ecommerce has gone on to change?
Due to the existing health crises, the ecommerce industry has gone on to become competitive, in comparison to a couple of years back. Some of the prominent companies like Nike or Adidas, have gone on to accelerate the shipping process. This is the main reason why data becomes table stakes. You will not be able to do anything till the point of time you have the right type of customer data on how the customer is using the product. There is a need to understand how the marketing process is going that is basically involved in the running of an e-commerce company.
What has turned out to be the biggest challenge in relation to data for an ecommerce industry?
It has to be said that the challenges are dependent upon the size of a company. An example is that the challenge for someone who is running a company like Nike would be different from someone like a B2B company. It has to be said that you will be getting to a point where the data team is going to have a specific data function with an ecommerce organization, one of the major challenges is data silos. Every person who is in your organization should be able to access the data they need instantly. Trust me this is going to take up a lot of infrastructure.
What is the main challenge, in terms of security and managing data?
With security, the privacy of data turns out to be a major concern. More so when it is an international business and there are different laws on how you may predict certain data between the different regions. The moment some regulations change, you have to alter the background to be dealing with the change. Since we are part of an ever-changing world a flexible data infrastructure can turn out to be crucial for a business.
How functional data pipelines would help you to address the challenges that are addressed?
Data pipelines are known to use standard information. What it ensures that the sales that were there yesterday may turn out to be the basic metrics for the current day. Ecommerce data pipeline would empower the users who are trying to tap into the basic features of a business.
The moment you are aware about the basics you are bound to avail a competitive advantage. Data pipelines would expand into the module of machine learning. AI along with other forms of business around business intelligence so that the customers would try to predict the future. So as to elongate the price of the models you may require a functional data pipeline.
The popular form of data pipelines
In the ETL pipeline this is one of the common ones. It is going to be the case when you are taking data, altering it and then you move it back on to the data warehouse. The transformation tends to take place in a data warehouse.
An ET pipeline is driven by many components of the business. You can say that somewhat it is working behind the scenes. In a lot of ways, it may lead to a situation where you are running a machine learning model and what is the price of an ad model that is going to work out. You can just run a machine without operating it. The moment you have gone on to figure out the ETL piece, you may be working on interesting pipelines that is going to be specific to a user case, be it machine learning or monitoring.
How do data pipelines improve marketing initiatives and sales in the domain of e-commerce?
Eventually it is all about visibility that we are focusing upon. There is a possibility of availing a ROI And a negative ROI. In sales or marketing the sales and figures of Monday may be entirely different from the sales and figures of the coming Monday. So, it all boils down to provide you visibility along with insights that may be spread across all data sources. Data pipelines would allow you to bunch several things together to see what works as you have to track those experiments at an exponential level or systematically in order to reiterate them.
What in the opinion of the clients are the biggest issues that could emerge when they are working with data pipelines?
Firstly, it may lead to an outrage of data, where the data pipeline is not there on time. There may be situations where an app or website is functioning but no leads are stored as it can turn out to be a major concern for a business. In some cases, the user cannot get the data, and it is because of the ETL pipelines an entire organization will be affected.
There may be a scenario where a data pipeline may not provide accurate information, There is a process of finding out where the business decisions were being made, or incorrect assumptions can be expensive and long.
Each team in an organization may end up doing things in their own way and to make matters worse the company could be at the center of cloud migration projects. You should give freedom to the data engineers so that they are able to customize the data pipelines and make them run on time that cannot be underestimated. If you want to learn more there are various platforms for help.